Post-Production
Lesson 6 from: FAST CLASS: The Art of Filmmaking and EditingJeff Medford, Ross Hockrow
Post-Production
Lesson 6 from: FAST CLASS: The Art of Filmmaking and EditingJeff Medford, Ross Hockrow
Lessons
Lesson Info
Post-Production
I want to talk about the role of producing because yesterday we kind of touched on the idea that some of you, half of you, a good percentage of you are going to want to see the financial benefits of adding filmmaking to your existing photography business, or maybe you're just trying to get into it and figure out how to monetize it and you don't necessarily want to get hands on. I want to make this point, I assume if after two days you're still tuning in, you enjoy some of the videos we've shown you. Cinematography is at the bottom of the list of my ability in filmmaking. I'm not a cinematographer. I don't consider myself a cinematographer. I don't consider myself in the upper echelon of cinematography. I just, I can do it, but really I'm a filmmaker first and foremost. So it starts with writing, then it goes to directing, then it's editing and then cinematography comes forth and I can show you that if you look at the raw footage, when you saw it on the first day, you saw the wedding wh...
ere we showed you the boring version of the footage and then I showed you the better version, you saw that the cinematography was about pretty lackluster. I was changing the exposure, some of the camera was shaky and it just kind of goes to show you, even with the family movie, when we first started on the regular monopod with no feet. The footage was essentially garbage, but the story is still ends up being good. That goes to show you that obviously cinematography is going to take you, make it, give you the eye candy to make your story look good. But the story is really, really what matters and that's kind of the point I want to say, because there's a lot of people out there who teach this, who are significantly better than I am at cinematography. There's just no question about it. But I would say our storytelling comes on equal level because my storytelling elevates the film because a lot of people don't necessarily pay attention to the cinematography if your story is really good. Then of course editing, you can do all kinds of crazy magic in editing, which I'm going to show you today. But going back to the role of producing, you really need somebody, I was making this point to Jeff, because we just shot a TV pilot two weeks ago. I wrote it, I directed it and I operated the camera at times and I won't touch the editing and the reason why he was like, "How in the world would you give up control like that?" And the reason why is because, I can't write something and edit it at the same time, because it's too much of my influence. Now, that's not to say that you can't do everything yourself, but it's really good to have another opinion, another voice. I would say that Jeff and I our opinions on film and what's good and what's proper are pretty opposite, I would say. The movies he likes, I hate and the movies I like, he hates and you can just see that we come from different spectrums of the film world, but there comes in the middle of balance. So when I have something edited, I say, "I'm done. Jeff will watch it," and he'll say, "Okay, this clip's too long. This guy's licking his lips here. This guy's picking his nose here. This thing's happening here. You need to change this here. This goes to long. This isn't long enough," and he'll go and then I'll cry like a baby and be like, "No, man, you don't know what you're talking about, we'll argue," and then I'll eventually give in and change it. That role is so important to have when you're a filmmaker, because you need that sort of voice of reason, checks and balances, too much of you is really bad. So if you're thinking about adding this to your business, you don't need to touch anything, but you need hire the people. You need to know exactly what's going on. You need to know how to tell your filmmakers, "This is what I want, this is what I want you to capture, this is how I want it to look," let them go do it. "This is how I want to edit it," let them go do it and then you can't just judge something and not know what you're looking at. So you have to understand the idea of storytelling. Would like to add anything to that, producer? Yup. My role in a lot of these shoots is the role of producer, which generally means I'm coordinating, I'm making phone calls, I'm scouting locations, I'm... Fundraising, I'm providing funds. I'm looking for the business opportunities and if you're doing this for a hobby, that's great, you can kind of do all that on your own, but if you're really looking to get into this and make a profit, you need some sort of producer to come in and take all that off of you so that you can focus on the story, on the cinematography and most importantly on the editing, I'm not saying that everyone's going to go out and write scripts like what we shot yesterday, which I'm going to show you what that looks like. There's a lot of other uses for it. You can do an audio visual script where you have just drawings or photos or screenshots coming down a list and then maybe a description of the camera movement, or description of the frame or a voiceover. There's a lot of uses for this. There's something I'm not going to show today, but you can do it. You can actually import a script into premiere and use the data for dialogue to find dialogue and things like that. There's a way that works with XML. I'll get an XML because that's how a pluralize works, which we are going to show today. But I just want to talk quickly about script format. A lot of people have been asking me, "Is there a difference between a shooting script and just a normal script that I would write." So for example, the script we used yesterday, this is just a regular script and if I was to make a shooting script, it would look very similar to this, but for the inner cutting example that we showed on day one, if I were to write that, I would write it straight linear as I would see the gift buying, I would write that and then I'd write the gift opening and I would write that. Probably as the writer originally visualizing it, I would write it inner cut because you put transitions in scripts and then when we came to shooting it, I would put the scenes together as if they were in order and shoot them essentially out of order. No pun intended, Out of order, it's right and again we said this on day one, we want you to think out of order, when you hear that phrase, we want you to think filmmaking, storytelling for the rest of your life. In the next few years, we hope to have millions of people across the world, thinking that when they say it, when they hear it, because it's very, very important and once that concept sinks in, it changes the way you approach storytelling and filmmaking yourself. So really quick, just a couple of script formatting housekeeping things that you want to keep in mind if you're going to do this. If you're going to do commercials, you're going to need these, no doubt. You definitely going to want this, your client's going to want to see it. They're going to want to read it. So you are going to have to know how to format it correctly and look professional. So the abbreviation, I don't know. I hope we're streaming my screen right now, but if not, INT in beginning of a scene, INT all that means is interior. So before every scene heading there either goes INT or EXT and EXT means exterior, right? So that tells your director or filmmaker where the shot is located inside or outside, which obviously points out a lot of things. What do you need for lighting, where it's going to be, does the weather matter, does it not matter? Then after it would say where the actual location is, so INT dining room and then day, so the time of day. So it would be day, it would be night. If I were to have a scene that comes a little bit later, it would say INT. DINING ROOM- moments later. If I wanted somebody to walk from outside, it would be, EXT. outside of John's house. Then he would walk into the door. It would be an entirely new scene setting and it would say INT. John's house continuous. That means that those two scenes go back to back and there was no passage of time in between. Whenever there's a character's name in the script, you can see it's always all capital, so that if someone wants to browse your script, maybe an actor wants to find their name, or like what character they're playing or whatever, they can find it very easily. Action always is framed on the left and it's not written in haiku. Like you don't need to be this descriptive writer, like, Chef Tony magically exits flowing his wrists and whatever, it just, he exits that's it, all that matters is action, so that people get the point. There is no need to add extra details to it, unless you want to say, Chef Tony exits quickly. So you know that he's going fast or, Chef Tony exits, he's angry, so you may be right the emotion in that. Then there would be a character's name which would go dead center and then under it will be the line. Now what you see here, Kevin Kubota, and then under it is sort of an adjective of how he's supposed to be acting, so confused, angry, he is screaming. A lot of times me as a writer, as just a style preference, I'll put like an action that is happening while he's saying line. So it'll be, Ross Hockrow while saying this, pats Jeff on the back. So it'll say, Ross Hockrow in parenthesis, patting Jeff on the back. you're doing a good job buddy. So instead of having a whole new action, I just put it right under in parenthesis. Then of course all the way to the right would be a transition. So it would be, cut to fade to black, inner cut with and that would be how I would write an inner cutting scene. So it would be a little bit of the scene inner cut with this part, then inner cut with this part. So that would be script formatting 101.